Resistive VS Capacitive touch panel technology:
Let us compare them to help you decide which type is best for you.
About Capacitive Touch Panels
These touch panels have multi-touch ability and are extremely durable in most environments including
withstanding water contact, dust and grease. Capacitive touch panels will activate with either a bare finger
or a capacitive stylus and have excellent dragging performance. Newhaven Display offers capacitive touch
panels with mutual capacitive sensors on the 3.5”, 4.3” and 5.0” TFTs. These capacitive touch panels come
with a built-in I2C interface controller. This allows for quick time to market while keeping development
costs low.
- Built-in controller with I2C interface (400KHz)
- Multi-touch capability, 5 simultaneous touches:
touch, life, directional & zoom gestures
- Sizes designed to mate with 3.5”, 4.3” 5.0” TFTs
-
6H hardness, >1 million touches
82% light transmittance
6mA at 3.3V power supply
0.03mA sleep mode
As capacitive screens don’t need much contact at all,
you can swipe across them very lightly and get just as
good a response as you would with a slow, heavy drag.
Capacitive Touch Panels are made of an insulator that
is coated with a transparent conductor. Typically,
Capacitive Touch Panels consist of glass as the insulator
coated in indium tin oxide (ITO). The human body is also
an electrical conductor, so when the human body comes
into contact with the Capacitive Touch Panel, the touch
panel’s electrostatic field becomes distorted. It is this
distortion that is then read by the touch panel controller and, depending on the program written, the display
will respond accordingly.
Transparent
Conductive surface
Projected capacitance has an
etching on the conductive layer
which forms a grid pattern allowing it to be more accurate and
have a more flexible operation.
The grid pattern on the conductive later is either created by
etching on either a single layer
of a conductive layer or by etching parallel lines on two separate
perpendicular layers of conductive
layers. Since this type of capacitance has a greater resolution, the
touch panel can operate without
direct contact allowing it to be
operable under screen protectors or other protective insulating
layers. In addition to the human
body, projected capacitance can
also interact with an active or
passive stylus. There are two different sensor types for projected
capacitive touch panels: Mutual
Capacitive and Self Capacitive
Transparent
Conductive layer
LCD TFT Display
Sensing
Lines
Insulating
Material
Protective
Cover
Driving
Lines
Glass Substrate with
Driving and Sensing Lines
LCD TFT Display
About Resistive Touch Panels
These touch panels are designed to allow items other than your finger to activate the touch. Resistive
touch panels don’t rely on organic properties of your finger so you have more options to interact with them.
Resistive technology senses pressure which is why a gloved hand will work, but it requires harder contact so
a stylus responds more accurately. Resistive touch screen are great for handwriting recognition with a stylus.
Newhaven Display offers many size options for our resistive touch panels including 240x320, 480x272,
640x480 and 800x480 pixels.
- Can operate with pointing devices like stylus, pen,
nail, gloved finger..etc.
- Sizes fit 2.4”, 3.5”, 4.3”, 5.7”, 7.0” TFTs
- Can operate at any level of humidity
- approx 75% light transmittance
- 3H hardness, >1 million touches
- Lower cost
Courtesy of http://wiiu.nintendolife.com
The resistive touch panel is made up of several
layers. When you press down onto the touch
panel with your finger or stylus, the top layer
flexes and pushes back onto a layer behind it.
This will effectively complete a circuit and tell
the controller which part of the touch panel is
being pressed.
polyester
film
stylus
or finger
top resistive
Circuit
Conductive ITO
(transparent metal
coating)
spacer dots or
insulating pads
glass or
acrylic
bottom Resistive
Circuit layer
Controller determines voltage between
layers to get touch coordinates